Rules Infractions
Jones was issued nine citations for rules infractions in his career, with a total of 145 days suspended. However, in the year prior to his death Jones had not been cited for any rules infractions. Railroaders who worked with Jones liked him but admitted that he was a bit of a chance taker. Unofficially though, the penalties were far more severe for running behind than breaking the rules. He was by all accounts an ambitious engineer, eager to move up the seniority ranks and serve on the better-paying, more prestigious passenger trains. At the time, passenger trains took priority on the rails: a passenger train never had to "go in the hole" for a freight train to pass. The only time a passenger train ever went to a side track or "passing track" was to allow another passenger train of higher priority to pass. And the passenger trains No. 1 through No. 4 had priority over all other trains, except when one would meet the other.
Read more about this topic: Casey Jones
Famous quotes containing the word rules:
“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)